


Small Talk, Stitches, and Beer

by weekend_conspiracy_theorist



Series: Periphery Defined [1]
Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Badass Ladies, Gen, Marci is more than Foggy's old fling, Sort of a character study, entirely plotless, season one
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-08-23
Packaged: 2018-04-16 21:50:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,309
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4641459
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weekend_conspiracy_theorist/pseuds/weekend_conspiracy_theorist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marci Stahl has dated Matt Murdock's best friend off and on for six years. There's no way in hell she wouldn't recognize the asshole when he showed up to her mugging, stupid ass cowl or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Talk, Stitches, and Beer

Marci has pepper spray in her purse, but she's had it since college. She has no idea what the shelf life is—would the stuff even work, if she was able to get to it? It's deep inside her purse, buried under years of chapstick and lipstick and spare flashlights and cheap first aid kits and the other detritus that's collected in her purse over the years. Does she even still have the pepper spray? She's suddenly not so sure.

 

This may be Hell's Kitchen, one of the most dangerous corners of New York, but she still.

 

She never thought she'd _need_ it.

 

Oh, the invulnerability of youth. She'd thought paying rent and having a 401K had finally gotten her past that, but maybe not.

 

"Give me your money!" The man snarls, and Marci decides that maybe now is not the best time to be contemplating seven year old pepper spray.

 

"Calm down, please," Marci says, pasting on the smile she uses around skittish clients, and slowly moves her purse from the crook of her elbow to the palm of her hand. She stays loose, natural, to whatever extent she possibly can.

 

She digs for a moment, and then her fingers linger on a thick pink tube. However, Marci Stahl is, if anything, a smart woman. There are too many risks, too many variables. She passes the pepper spray by and withdraws her wallet.

 

"Can I take my license and credit cards?" she asks, honey dripping soothingly from her tone. (A flash of nerves—is she pouring it on too strong?) "You'd get caught too easily, trying to use them, and there's still around a hundred in cash."

 

The man hesitates, his knuckles white around the grip of the gun. His index finger is on the trigger, and Marci wonders how close he is to pulling it by accident.

 

She doesn't want to find out.

 

"Just give me the cash," he finally grinds out, and Marci opens her wallet.

 

What happens next happens almost too quickly to catalog. Someone else comes skidding into the alley, a big man who moves surprisingly quickly and agilely, and the gun goes off. There's a spray of red, Marci feels a screaming pain in her leg, and a dark figure drops from the sky.

 

Marci is sitting on the ground and cursing fluently in three languages, hand clamped over the graze in her calf, when Daredevil suddenly looms over her. Her would-be mugger and the man the vigilante had presumably been chasing are both unconscious in the background, and Daredevil extends a helpful hand.

 

"Are you alright?" he asks, voice low and gritty and _obviously_ disguised, and Marci stares at him. At the frightfully familiar slope of his shoulders, his jawline, the tilt of his head.

 

"Are you fucking kidding me, Murdock?!?"

 

***

 

"How?" Matt demands, as Marci grumpily flings open the cabinet under her sink. He's discarded his stupid ass cowl and is staring in her general direction with unfocused eyes.

 

Marci pauses, settles back on her haunches to glare at him with narrowed eyes. "I am _not_ the one who needs to be answering that question, Mr. Blind Vigilante." She grabs the first aid kit that _she's never fucking opened because the most she's ever done is gotten a paper cut or a skinned knee_ and sheds her ruined pantyhose.

 

She tears away the plastic, and Matt juts out his jaw in that stubborn way he does. "How did you recognize me?" he demands again.

 

Marci tears open an alcohol wipe, wonders if she needs something stronger, and rolls her eyes at him. "I've been dating your best friend on and- ah-" she winces at the sting-"off for six years, Murdock. I know what you look like, the way you move. Just because you've got a stupid ass mask on that covers your damn cheekbones doesn't mean I won't recognize you." She pauses, adds, "Asshole."

 

Just for good measure.

 

She puts a generous amount of Neosporin on the cut (delightfully shallow, given she was fucking _shot_ ), slaps on a bandage, and mourns the fact that she's going to have to wear pant suits for the foreseeable future.

 

Matt continues to stare blankly (even more so than usual) in her direction throughout this, and she sighs as she rises to her feet. "I'm going to change into something comfortable, Murdock, and then you're going to tell me what the hell is going on." She narrows her eyes, seeing his slight twitch towards the window. "Don't even think about running," she snarls. "I know where you live, and I will absolutely track you down for answers if I have to."

 

She walks away, and he mutters, "Bulldog," under his breath.

 

"Damn fucking right!" She calls back, feeling a glow of satisfaction at the old college nickname.

 

***

 

Marci moves to the kitchen, for now ignoring the vigilante standing awkwardly in her living room with his mask clutched in one hand, and she hears the slight creak of leather as he shifts uncomfortably. The Man Without Fear is scared of her.

 

Good.

 

"Does Foggy know?" she asks, as she turns on her coffee maker.

 

"Yes," Matt says, reluctantly, and Marci hums.

 

"Did he kick your ass when he found out?"

 

"He wanted to."

 

"He doesn't like vigilantes."

 

"No."

 

Marci lets the sound and smell of grinding coffee beans fill the air for a long moment, her hands tight on the edge of the counter. She and Foggy—they've both always known that romantically there's nothing between them but good sex, but it doesn't mean she doesn't care about him. Doesn't know him almost as well as Matt does. They could be platonic soulmates, maybe, the way Matt and Foggy are just soulmates in general.

 

She thinks about how Foggy must have felt when he found out about this, thinks about the big fight that Foggy and Matt had not that long ago that resulted in Foggy reaching out to her for companionship (beyond sex and help with a case) for the first time in years. (They watched shitty horror movies and ate popcorn and pizza and ice cream and complained about everything in their lives other than the big stuff, the stuff they actually wanted to complain about.)

 

"Are you really blind?" she asks, but she knows he is. (Foggy never would have forgiven Matt, if he found out he'd been lying about something _that_ fundamental since the very first day they met.)

 

"Yes. I have…" Matt trails off. "The rest of my senses are heightened. Enough for me to be able to do this."

 

She looks over her shoulder, and he looks… utterly lost. Confused. Anxious. Like a deer caught in the headlights, like Matt Murdock discovered to be a vigilante by someone he, in many ways, barely knows.

 

"Sit the fuck down and get comfortable, Murdock," Marci sighs, letting her head fall back and her eyes fall closed. "This is going to be a long night."

 

***

 

Marci wonders, sometimes, what people think when they see her.

 

Snake-headed lawyer, probably. Ice Queen, maybe. Bitch, almost certainly.

 

None of these things are, per se, false. She works for a big firm, the kind that screws the little guy, and she very rarely loses sleep at night. She doesn't tend to express many emotions other than lust or anger, and even those are dedicated to very specific people, or at least specific circumstances. And she's bossy, competitive, ambitious, sexual, and all of the other things that add up to "bitch" when it's a woman who embodies them.

 

She also has a fondness for small animals, a devilish sense of humor, and a vague desire to one day start her own firm. One where everything's above board legally in every goddamn way, at least, even if it doesn't fight for the little guy.

 

She knows what injustice looks like, okay.

 

She may not really care about stopping it, but she doesn't want to cause it.

 

***

 

"You're an idiot," she tells Daredevil, and the vigilante just shrugs and continues climbing in her window.

 

She lugs out her first aid kit, which is now depressingly depleted given that she only opened it a month ago, and slaps it down on her coffee table. It's a Friday, so she doesn't even hesitate before heading to the kitchen and breaking out the beer. "This is my own damn fault," she grouses, and catches the flicker of a smile on Matt's face as she turns back around. "I should have just pretended I didn't recognize you, stuck around to talk to the police, and then gone straight to the Daily Bugle to get rich off of my expose."

 

"You'd never," he responds, that smile flickering over his lips again. "Foggy would be so sad." He catches the beer she chucks at him (unnecessarily hard and fast, clearly only because she's still a little fascinated by his spatial awareness), sets it aside, and strips off the top of the suit to treat what appears to be a knife wound.

 

"That should probably get stitches," Marci tells him mildly, cracking open her beer as she curls up in her incredibly gorgeous but uncomfortable armchair. (He asked her to help, once, but she just threw an ace bandage at him and told him to suck it up and do it himself unless he was going to pay her for her time and effort.)

 

"I can do them myself," he says with a shrug.

 

Marci snorts. "Of course you can."

 

("Why do you keep coming back?" she asks, frustrated, as she watches him pop his shoulder back into place. She's sickly fascinated by the clicking noise it makes as he rotates it, grimacing.

 

She thinks he's not going to answer her, but just before he leaves- he never stays long- he pauses, hazel eyes downcast. "You're neutral," he says, quietly. "You aren't worried about me, and you don't try to tell me to stop."

 

He's out the window by the time she answers, just as quiet herself, but she knows he can still hear her.

 

"I'm a little worried about you.")

 

***

 

There's the click of the line being picked up, the crackle from someone's breath hitting the receiver, and Marci starts before he can get any words out.

 

"I'm having drinks with some people from work. I'm probably not going to be home at all tonight." She blows a stray strand of hair out of her face, makes a noise of annoyance when it falls right back to where it was.

 

"Okay," Matt says, mildly, as if he doesn't know why she's telling him this.

 

"Find somewhere else to stitch yourself up tonight, is what I'm saying, Murdock."

 

"Foggy and I have paperwork to catch up on. I wasn't even planning to go out."

 

Marci feels tension leave her shoulders that she hadn't even realized was there. "I'm holding you to that, asshole."

 

She hears Foggy call out, "Who's that?" in the background.

 

"Marci," Matt answers, and there's a crash like Foggy just dropped paperwork or tripped over a desk. "I think I need to go," Matt says, laughter in his voice, and Marci grins.

 

"Kiss him to make it better," she snickers, and hangs up before Matt can fully squawk out a protest.

 

***

 

"Drinks," Marci repeats, dumbfounded, and Matt lets out a small huff of a laugh on the other end of the line.

 

"Drinks," he confirms.

 

"Friends get drinks, Murdock," Marci says, slowly. "Vigilantes and their acquaintances with first aid kits make small talk over stitches and beer."

 

Matt hums his agreement.

 

"I so did not sign on for this," she protests. He laughs.

 

"Josie's at eight," he informs her cheerfully and hangs up.

 

***

 

Marci presses down on the wound, ignoring the blood stain on her beautiful new carpet, and fumbles for her phone with her other hand. She tosses her hair over her shoulder with a flick of her head, sandwiches the phone between her shoulder and ear, and grumbles under her breath while she waits for Foggy to pick up.

 

"Matt's in really bad shape and I don't know how to do stitches," she says after Foggy has grumbled out a half-asleep hello.

 

"I'll be right over," Foggy answers, abruptly awake, and Marci hangs up.

 

The blood is seeping through the bandage, darker than she would have expected and the smell is coppery and thick and cloys to the roof of her mouth. She wonders if she'll ever be able to get rid of it, and if Foggy still has the spare key she lent him when she was on vacation and wanted him to water her plants.

 

(Her plants are fake.

 

It took him three days to figure it out, and then he called and cursed her out in Punjabi.)

 

Her hands are covered in blood by the time Foggy shows up (key in hand), and she scrubs at them furiously while Foggy stitches Matt up. She's going to have to come up with an excuse for them being dried out and raw when she shows up to work tomorrow, she thinks, somewhat hysterically, but she doesn't stop scrubbing until Foggy guides her away from the kitchen sink and into her bathroom.

 

He presses clothes into her hands, tells her softly to take a shower.

 

"Put him in my bed," she says lowly, and Foggy doesn't argue.

 

They fall asleep on the couch, curled into each other for comfort, and Marci spares a moment to hope that Matt doesn't leave before they wake up, like the asshole he is.

 

***

 

Marci presses a beer into his hand, smacks him upside the head.

 

"I'm not fucking neutral," she informs him.

 

Matt sighs. "I'm sorry I scared you the other night."

 

"Better be," she says, smugly, and walks over to her normal armchair. "I'd kick your ass, ninja skills or not, if you weren't."

**Author's Note:**

> I've seen a lot of fics where Marci and Matt were rivals. I wanted to write a fic where Marci and Matt were bros.


End file.
